Deals With The Devil
by Izreal
Summary: When you grind all reason down and purify it to its basest essence, it comes down to the simple duality that is power and temptation.
1. WRATH

**Disclaimer—One Piece and all associated characters ect belongs to Eiichiro Oda not me I just enjoy reading/watching it. Spoken dialogue belongs to him if it seems very familiar. His Dark Materials and daemons belong to Philip Pullman.**

**Like most of my fanwork this started as a thought exercise that expanded into something kinda awful and also kinda darkly wonderful. I am posting this while waiting for more information to come in about Law's past so I can flipping edit my other works (if possible) and continue with my longer narrative continuation of "Gnat". Though I may have to knock it completely AU if things keep spiraling as they are because...yeah.**

**WRATH**

* * *

They, the _magical_ they that was the gossipy voice of the public conscious, always spoke about the costs and benefits. It was called a fairy tale, a pipe dream, or a castle on a cloud.

Being able to swim? Was a small loss that most pirates and even marines scoffed at—there were ways around that weakness, if you had a couple of brain cells to dedicate to the simple problem that was avoiding water, then you would likely be fine. It would never be safe to be on the ocean, ability to swim or not, but what was the point of sailing if there wasn't an element of danger spicing up things? You didn't become a pirate or join the marines if you didn't have some urge to put yourself in the path of danger or were just incredibly stupid.

Sea stone? Also not worth mentioning, you just had to be aware that the marines loved the damn stuff and thus you had to make sure you had contingency plans to get out of it. It was just foolish to believe that you would be able to avoid the stuff in perpetuity.

Power? Yes, and so many to choose from! There was the ability to become and animal, an element, or any power that could be imagined and fair beyond. Power that was so incredibly addicting that it tempted even the sternest and most steadfast of souls to reach out and take it when it was offered. Especially when that offer came in the most innocent of packages.

Wealth? You could sell them for a high price if you didn't consume it yourself. And who didn't love money? Especially a _lot_ of money? But then it came back to the last question of power, which could also get you a lot of money and not just for one sale.

**Loosing your ****_soul_****.**

That fact? That one _little_ fact, which was spoken about in whispers and shifty eyes? One of the world's greatest of taboos? Made even the most power-hungry pause and think about taking that. One. _Life_. **_Changing_**_._ **_Bite_**.

After all, one was raised with their soul at their side from the moment of birth. Adulthood was marked by your soul settling into its final form that was the truest reflection of yourself. Your daemon was your companion, your friend, your sibling, your confident, your conscious, your other half, and your truest voice.

**Your daemon was ****_you._**

_The breadfruit was cupped in his hand. It was green and spiny, digging into his fingers like miniature daggers. The pain was both grounding and threatening. It appeared to be a normal and completely harmless fruit, until you realized the dark spirals on each ridge meant something fair more __**sinister**__ in nature._

_The question was…was it worth it?_

**Souls, only parted in death…**

_Bepo was there, watching him examine his cursed prize. The bear-man who was alone in the world in the most horrible of ways—he hadn't been granted the choice that Law now had. Bepo had paid a horrible price that could never be put in balance. Lists of sins perpetuated against his friend and Law himself flickered through his thoughts like red-hot brands, burning away his resolve in their wake._

_Kalpana watched also. Her eyes glowed sulfurous yellow in the dim room, catching the light from the singular lamp even from where she lay hidden in the darkest shadows. They were hollow and dead but for the lust for blood that flickered in their depths._

_Rage simmered in Law's veins clawing at his heart. Every time he looked at Bepo, the flames of rage in the pit of his soul burned hotter and wilder, at what he saw…and what he __**didn't**__ see. And of course, they started that damn spiral of hate made just as a chain, where the links were forged from each sin made against his person. Which lead back to the beginning of the wretched bonds, it was but a single name etched deeply into an iron weight anchoring the chain at the bottom of his soul._

_Corazon…_

_Kalpana's patchy fur bristled, her scarred lips and flea-bitten ears drawn back, broken teeth and bloody gums flashing in the darkness as she snarled in visible fury. She was the picture of abuse and sickness, but her bones were made of steel, her teeth the most deadly of scalpels. She was sculpted of whipcord and razor wire, deadly and vicious, but so terribly brittle from being carelessly bent one too many times._

_"Yes." She answered his unasked question lowly, her rusty, seldom used voice like the first warning rumble of thunder before the approaching storm._

_There was no hesitation. No second-guessing. No question as to what the choice should be. The certainty was carved into the primordial essence of the universe._

_Law cut the fruit in half._

**Unless you took a bite…**

_All he could taste was the rotted bloody bile that was agony as he shattered into a billion pieces. The world spun around him in fragments of pain and the screaming ghosts of the dead and dying. The apparitions clawed at him with broken fingers covered in blood and gore leaving burning cold trails across his skin as they attempted to drag him down into hell. He couldn't tell if the sounds deafening him were their screams or his own._

**…at which moment your daemon would ****_Dissolve_**** away.**

_The fragments of __**him **__settled into a new form, made from the original but not the same as it had been before._

_That could __**never**__ be the same again. No matter how many times he reconstructed the shamble of pieces._

_His body hummed with power, like a nest of angry wasps had settled just under his skin making their hive within his heart._

_Gold dust spiraled around in the stale air before it faded away as if it had never been there at all. Yet, all he could see was the final moments of a skeletal white wolf with dead eyes commanding him to __**massacre**__ the man who had brought them to this._

But then, they wouldn't be called Devil Fruits if there weren't a cost.

* * *

**Wow, this was morbid. I may even continue this particular Daemon AU because it is delightfully creepy.**

**Law- Dissolved, ****_Canis lupus arctos_**** (Arctic Wolf)**

**Kalpana= idea imagination fancy. (Indian)**

** www . meaning – of - names Indian - names / kalpana . asp**

**Though likely a pun usage of this meaning, Kapana is chosen for the "fancy" part. Edward Low, ie the most likely guy that Law is based after, captained "The Fancy" as one of his many ships—at least according to Wikipedia.**

**The daemons being affected by powers thing is not totally my idea, I have seen it in the Avengers fandom in relation to the Hulk at least once (Though in that case, it wasn't complete loss it was only in Hulk form). However, I am, as far as I know, the first to take this idea to the Devil Fruits and apply it. And I think I am the second to write a daemon AU for One Piece period—the other is on AO3. Go me. In a way this is almost as bad as incision…whereas incision you still have your daemon and are really…messed up, eating a DF essentially destroys the physical form of your soul. Luckily, you don't become a zombie…you get messed up in a different way.**


	2. SLOTH

Dialogue modified from the first manga by Eiichiro Oda. His Dark Materials and daemons belong to Philip Pullman.

**SLOTH**

**The sins of the father...**

* * *

Shanks felt like his he had been stabbed in the heart by a hot iron. Panic burned though his veins as he franticly attempted to prevent it from happening, but knew it was already too late. In a spray of black feathers and with a horrified shriek his green-billed toucan daemon fluttered around frantically in distress, mirroring her other half's overwhelming horror. His world narrowed to one tiny black haired boy with chubby cheeks and a smile that reminded him of his captains.

"_SPIT IT OUT_!"

There was a whisper of sound, like the final barely audible chime of a bell, and a faint sparkle gold dust drifted in the air where Azadeh had once stood, flickering between shapes as a child's daemon was wont to do. Shanks and Saoirse had held many long arguments over what Azadeh would eventually settle as, or if she would even settle at all, considering Luffy's personality. Together they had speculated that, one day in the future, they would meet again as equals, with Luffy standing tall with his settled daemon smiling her human's enormous smile at his side.

Luffy's arm stretched and he hit the floor while Shanks still held his wrist high above the bar's counter. Saoirse keened in loss and grief above their heads, crying when her human would not, _could not_.

It was _far _too late.

Now, no one would ever know.

* * *

Saoirse dug her talons into his left shoulder, she didn't weigh much, but her physical presence was enough to help dispel the off-balance feeling he had been fighting since his arm had been bitten off.

Shank's taunting smile softened and Saoirse trilled softly in amusement as Luffy's boastful yell echoed across the docks and faded over the water.

"Better than us? Well then," He put the hat on the boy's head in apology and bitter regret; he could never forget what he had allowed in his carelessness and forgive himself for letting it happen. "Then I have a favor to ask you, take care of this hat for me."

He watched the boy cry but knew that this was all he could do to attempt to make up for his folly. He had thought long and hard and it was only in a haze of drunkenness that he had read over his ships logs and remembered about a particular island he had gone to where the people there walked around _alone_.

"It means a lot to me, it's my treasure." He wasn't talking about the hat alone anymore, but the boy under it as well, already beginning to seem them as _one_ being in two forms.

The people on the island had not possessed that strange emptiness that nearly every devil fruit user carried in their eyes. Didn't have the air of sacrifice and loss that would never completely go away. For each had forged their souls from the metals of their home and carried them with them for their lives in the form of armor that was lovingly warn and cared for.

"Bring it back to me someday. On the seas, when you have become a great pirate." He said.

_Forge your own soul, Luffy._

* * *

**And now Shanks complete freak out in the bar gains a whole new level of creepy and depressing.**

**The reason this isn't called gluttony, is that sloth makes more sense if you don't think about Luffy's propensity to eat everything but think about the fact that Shanks was stupid and lazy enough to let the situation develop in the first place. I mean, good job adult figure leaving around (in this case) a soul-destroying object in reach of grabby little hands.**

**I imagine even in canon OP, Shanks feels some level of guilt about the incident, loosing the ability to swim among whatever else? In this universe I have created? It is all the worse and he is reacting such.**

**Daemons:**

**For names: www . meaning – of – names search / index . asp ? nm = Freedom & stype = 1**

**Also for Shanks I ran what little we know about his personality through "The Golden Compass Daemon Test". He got Social Joker Soul. After that I just did some googling based on suggestions and found something that seemed to fit his sense (read: lack) of style.**

**Pretty good quiz actually its fairly difficult to bias your answers to get the result you want rather than are. www . helloquizzy tests / the – golden – compass – daemon - test**

**Luffy: Unsettled and Dissolved**

**Azadeh- Freedom (Persian)**

**Shanks: ****_Ramphastos dicolorus _****(Green-billed Toucan)**

**Saoirse- Freedom (Irish)**

**I went with two differing names that mean freedom as this is a ongoing theme with these two. It also adds another more intangible connection between mentor and student.**

**All dialogue from my memory of the anime and the first manga modified for this AU.**


	3. GREED

**Disclaimers**** on the first chapter.**

**And now for the third installment. Still waiting on more information before I continue Gnat. It's coming.**

**GREED**

**All that glitters...**

* * *

_I don't like it Buggy…it's **evil**…_

He's choking, and it's _horrible_. His lungs burn, and he claws at his throat, drawing blood with his nails. The pain from the self-inflicted cuts washed away under the roaring tide of primal terror from the overwhelming threat to his life. All that mattered at that moment was survival.

All he can think about is the lack of air and the tightness of his throat. The darkening edges to his vision. And how he couldn't die before he became rich and famous because that was what he dreamed about and strove for each and every moment and _no he will not die like **this**._

Then, a heavy hand hit his back and made the fruit go down to settle like lead in his stomach, no like the _gold_ that he will never see and touch with his fingers, his thoughts turn to anger. It is an all-consuming rage that tints his dreams of golden coins and gems red and smelling of the slaughterhouse district of the town he had grown up in.

Because now he won't have all that money he could have had from selling it. All that money gone in an instant, gone, gone, _gone_. Because of that fool of a redhead who should be shot, _shot_, **_shot_**_._

In fact, in his haze of anger and trying to get the terrible taste out of his mouth he doesn't realize that Aurnia's voice hasn't hesitantly piped up to add a warning or chastisement.

When he does realize the obvious, he is at first only offended on principle but actually somewhat _glad_ as he doesn't have to listen to the little brown and green peafowl whine and tell him to be nicer to others and make friends not enemies. Doesn't have to listen to her nag him _constantly _about things that are more important than money, which is _stupid_ because growing up everyone else had had it and he had been forced to look at them being so happy, _happy_, **_happy_**_._ Money was _important_. It was everything and how could she _not_ see that? Stupid, _stupid_, **_stupid_**. How could she _possibly_ be his soul if she didn't understand that one simple fact? Weren't they supposed to be one person?

And then he realized just how _alone_ he was when the sounds of comradely and companionship of his crewmates began to claw at his heart and attempted to bury the aloneness in the husky siren song of gold and soft coy twitter of gems. Surrounding himself, he built a nest of gilt and finery won with cruelty and loud laughter that rang as empty as hissing the void in his soul.

But the hollowness didn't go away but became deeper. With each coin stolen, sacrificed by tossing it into the hole to attempt to fill it, it did not but shallow the offering and grew _deeper_.

It was only on the darkest nights when he was _alone_ drunk to a near stupor, when he can just see a bird's shadow and almost hear her soft sweet voice, nearly make out the words she sings, yet finding them just beyond his hearing. That was the only time that he cannot lie to the world, and admits to himself the real reason why he will **_never forgive that red haired bastard_.**

Because it is only then he can admit that he is broken, _broken_, **_broken_**.

* * *

**Holy hemlock I am a _bastard_, and also write really dark things at 1:00 in the morning. I almost did this from Shank's point of view but decided not too…and wow. Just wow. This also started out as about eight sentences that suddenly flushed out to so much more.**

**I took the quiz for Buggy also as he is hard to get a read on. "Bold and Brash Soul" which suggested peacock as one of the recommendations. I picked a really pretty bird for Shanks so it was a great suggestion as the dichormany between a relatively ugly bird of the peasant family (ie chubby and kinda akward looking) compared to a tucan (elegant and colorful) was yet another psychological reason for Buggy to hate Shanks** **. Male peafowl are beautiful no matter the species (though the congo peafowl's are the least beautiful of the three species) and kinda look like they belong in a circus. So Buggy gets the fancy bird, sadly as he is a man, he gets the less beautiful female as a daemon.**

**Buggy- Dissolved, Congo Peafowl_ (Afropavo cognensis)_**

**Aurnia—Golden Lady (Irish)**

**-Same names site as in other chapters**

**The name for Buggy's daemon was really easy to pick. And fits in with his greedy temperament.**


End file.
